Classical versus quantum information

[nomadreid]

I am a little confused at the description of quantum information, even though I more or less understand the concept of a qubit as being a superposition. That which confused me was a phrase saying that the quantum information is the classical information that can be retrieved. But one can only retrieve classical information in whole units of bits. On the other hand, using the Shannon definition, one can come up with an amount of information which is not a whole number of bits. In other words, can we say that there is, for example 1.5 bits of quantum information?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

@nomadreid did you find any more insight on this topic?

 

[nomadreid]

Not much. I assume the answer to my explicit question is "yes", as I see that non-integer amounts of information come up in Chapter 11 of Nielsen & Chuang (Quantum Computation and Quantum Information), but this leaves the phrase "amount of classical information" a poor choice of words.